Give Peas a chance

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The Black Eyed Peas are good for you - well, so think James Brown, Justin Timberlake and Sting - who are lining up to jam with them. George Palathingal finds out there's plenty of love.

THE BLACK EYED PEASHordern Pavilion, Moore ParkOctober 18, 7.30pm$75.90Bookings 9266 4800The shows on October 16 and 17 have sold out

It must have sounded like a dream come true for two of the heterosexual male MCs of chart-ruling pop-rap crew the Black Eyed Peas: a meeting with Hustler magazine about a possible "spread". And at the American porn rag's Playboy Mansion-style place, too.

OK, Jaime "Taboo" Gomez needed some convincing - he's a family man now, dedicated to raising his son - but his excited fellow Pea, Will Adams, managed to persuade him.

"So we end up driving to this big house," Gomez says. "We walk in and it's all these ladies just sitting there, right?

"Then, all of a sudden, these guys rush out and they're like, 'Yo, put your hands against the wall, ladies on the right-hand side, men on the left-hand side!'

"The cops go and get Will and they take him away. Will's, like, Mr Innocent - he had nothing to do with anything - so Polo [Molina, Black Eyed Peas manager] goes after him. He comes back out and he thinks, 'Oh, this is fake, we're being set up.' So he starts beating up people, he beats up a cop ..."

How would our heroes get out of this sticky situation? How would their police-assaulting manager? And what exactly were the "ladies" wearing, if anything?

We didn't get an answer to the final question - reasonably, seeing as we didn't actually ask it - but to answer the others it turns out Molina was right. Adams had set the whole thing up for actor Ashton Kutcher's TV celebrity prankfest, Punk'd.

"It turned out to be a fiasco because we didn't get punk'd; they got punched," Gomez says.

I don't suppose we'll get to see that on TV.

"No, you'd never see that. It went wrong for them."

Yet things have been going right for Gomez and his Los Angeles crew lately. The Black Eyed Peas entered the pop superleague last year with Where is the Love? It was the year's third biggest-selling single in Australia and was nominated for two Grammy awards including record of the year.

The album that spawned it, the band's third longplayer, Elephunk, is still lurking near the top of the ARIA album chart more than a year after its release.

Yet Gomez doesn't attribute their popularity to breakthrough singles and a hit album.

"The thing about us is that we're successful because of us touring," the 29-year-old says.

"Elephunk was just an added bonus. The reason we became so worldly successful is because we had been to these places without having a huge success.

"We're glad it didn't happen with that first record [1998's Behind the Front] because it made us more hungry. It made you have more passion and it made you understand the business a lot better."

The Black Eyed Peas formed in 1995 when rapping breakdancers Adams and Allan Pineda invited the similarly skilled Gomez to join them in a new multiracial hip-hop project. Adams is African-American, Pineda is Filipino and Gomez has Mexican and Native American Shoshone blood.

For Behind the Front and its follow-up, Bridging the Gap, the trio balanced their loquacious male raps with sweet female vocals from session singers, principally Kim Hill, and guest stars such as Macy Gray. Shortly before Elephunk, the band officially became a quartet when they recruited Stacey Ferguson, another Californian with Mexican-Native American heritage.

Their own members' performances aside, some of the Peas' most memorable tracks have involved the high-profile cameos of others: from Gray's on Request Line to Justin Timberlake's on Where is the Love?

Their original collaborator wish list for Monkey Business - the anticipated follow-up to Elephunk - included Beyonce Knowles, Coldplay and Justin Hawkins from the Darkness, after he kept crashing their Big Day Out set to join in on Let's Get Retarded.

"We meet these people on the road and we build relationships to the point where if we wanna work it's a natural progression," Gomez says.

"We become friends first."

Disappointingly, the band didn't get to work with any of the aforementioned -"Hopefully in the future something will happen," the MC says - but the new album still has its fair share of exciting collaborators. And Sting.

"We've got James Brown on it, the Godfather of Soul," Gomez says. "We've also got Sting on it. We're currently also looking to work with Usher."

How was working with the Godfather?

"It was a great experience. He's a great man, great inspiration, a very powerful entity - y'know, as soon as he walks in the room, it's just a burst of energy that is very impeccable and it's only one style: it's James Brown.

"We felt very excited and very honoured to have him record a song with us. The song is called They Don't Want Music."

There was a likeable diversity to Elephunk, from the vibrant dancehall of Hey Mama to the deliciously mellow reggae of Third Eye and the rocking Papa Roach collaboration, Anxiety.

What can we expect on the new album?

"It's just a growth of Elephunk," Gomez says. "We've managed to be a little bit more conscientious about worldly issues and worldly rhythm.

"We travelled to a lot of places to get inspiration. We've been to Brazil, we're heavily influenced by a lot of Brazilian music ... rock ... So that's what we're leading off into Monkey Business."

It might be a stupid question, but every time Gomez mentions the titles of the last album and the forthcoming one it bubbles to the surface. What's with the band's animal fixation?

"We've always been the type to play on titles. Like, if you look at Behind the Front and then Bridging the Gap, it's an oxymoron. You know, now we're heading into animals.

"We just felt that animals are very powerful entities in themselves, they represent a lot of different things in a lot of cultures. And a monkey, it represents intelligence. The elephant represented strength."

Yet more than strength and intelligence, the Black Eyed Peas' most distinctive quality might be their enduring positivity - an unfashionable, often-eschewed quality in hip-hop.

But to Gomez, that merely underlines how different the band are to others.

"We've always been positive heads that had something to say other than 'I love myself' and 'I love my ride and my jewels', you know? That was a stereotypical way of going.

"So we decided to just go out and show that we are positive, progressive and appreciate all forms of music - not just hip-hop."